Model Citizen

PRE-ELECTION SPECIAL EPISODE! 

Opposition to Donald Trump has been a unifying force for Democrats. Progressive and moderate factions of the party set aside their differences during the race, but what happens if Joe Biden wins? How do Democrats maintain cohesion when progressives are gaining strength and formerly Republican college-educated whites stream into the party? What happens to a post-Trump GOP? Does it continue to hang together or split up into rival factions vying for control of the party? 

Steven Teles, a Johns Hopkins political scientist and Niskanen senior fellow, argues we're heading for a de-polarizing era of party factionalization. In this episode we talk about Teles' essay in National Affairs, "The Future is Faction" and the final chapter of his new book "Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites" (both with co-author Robert Saldin), both of which analyze the prospects of intra-party division, weakening control by leadership, and the renewed possibility of bipartisan coalitions and moderation in policymaking. 

"The Future is Faction" by Steven Teles and Robert Saldin, National Affairs

Never Trump: Revolt of the Conservative Elites  by Steven Teles and Robert Saldin

Host: Will Wilkinson (@willwilkinson)

Audio engineer: Ray Ingegneri

Music: Dig Deep by RW Smith

Model Citizen is a production of the Niskanen Center  (@niskanencenter)

To support this podcast or any of the Niskanen Center's programs, visit: https://niskanencenter.org/donate

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

If winning the most votes made you president, Joe Biden would have it in the bag by now. But voters don't get to pick the president here in America. The Electoral College does. Which is why Biden's supporters can't rest easy, even though it's a lock that he'll win the popular vote. Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, owes his presidency this baffling, archaic kludge of an institution and he's still got an outside shot at a second term because of it. So why did our blessed Founders saddle us with the Electoral College? Why is it still there, despite many efforts through the years to reshape or kill it? 

This week's guest, Alexander Keyssar wrote a book, "Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?" to answer precisely this question. We discuss how the Electoral College was a makeshift afterthought compromise at the Constitutional Convention, how its half-baked rules of the Electoral College almost immediately threw presidential elections into disarray, how it spurred the creation of political parties (despite the Founder's intentions), why the states converged on winner-take-all rules for the allocation of electoral votes rather than settling on district-based or proportional schemes, and much more. Why did later attempts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote fail? Are future attempts incredibly unlikely, or is it much more likely than you think? We talk about that, too. 

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy school for government. He's the author of many distinguished works of history, including the "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.   

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Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College by Alexander Keyssar

Host: Will Wilkinson (@willwilkinson)

Audio engineer: Ray Ingegneri

Music: Dig Deep by RW Smith

Model Citizen is a production of the Niskanen Center  (@niskanencenter)

To support this podcast or any of the Niskanen Center's programs, visit: https://niskanencenter.org/donate

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

"Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy" by Brink Lindsey and Samuel Hammond 

 

 

 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

What do people really mean when they say they want to "defund the police," and who wants to do it? In a new paper, "Reconstructing Justice: Race, Generational Divides, and the Fight Over 'Defund the Police'" this week's guest, Michael Fortner, shows, among other things, that differences in opinion over police reform reflect age differences more than racial differences. We talk about how living through the crime wave of the '80s and '90s continues to affect the views of older Americans, black and white alike. We also explore how the logic of negative partisanship combined with Donald Trump's overt racism has pushed white liberals toward wokeness. And we dig into proposals for fixing law enforcement that are, unlike proposals to defund or even abolish the police, actually popular. Michael Fortner teaches political science at the CUNY Graduate Center and is the author of the prize-winning "Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment." He's also, it's worth mentioning, a newly minted Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

In cities around the country, citizens assembled to demand racial justice and an end to police brutality have been met with ... border patrol agents? Why are CBP agents clubbing and gassing peaceful citizen protesters many, many miles from any border? Why are tens of thousands of completely innocent migrants, who pose no danger to anyone, imprisoned in abusive and subhuman conditions in a sprawling network of camps and detention centers? In her new book, "Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All," political theorist Elizabeth Cohen explains how out-of-control federal immigration enforcement agencies came to not only pointlessly terrorize and persecute immigrants, but to pose a clear and urgent danger to the safety and basic liberties of American citizens. We explore the roots of restrictive American immigration policy in skull-measuring eugenic pseudoscience, whom the Northeastern WASP elite did and did not consider to be white, and how every attempt to engineer the ethnic composition of the population through immigration policy has backfired. Elizabeth tells the story of her mother and grandparent's escape from the Nazis, their perilous statelessness, and eventual settlement in the U.S. as refugees. I talk about being a pompous descendant of old American stock who makes fun of his wife for being Irish-Italian. (I promise there's a good point in this.) And we talk about what should be done to fix our broken and dangerous immigration system. Elizabeth F. Cohen is Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. In addition to "Illegal," she is author of "The Political Value of Time" and many other fine works of scholarship.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

About 330 million people inhabit the good ol' US of A. Seems like a lot. But is it enough? Policy journalist and Vox.com co-founder Matthew Yglesias argues it's not even close. In his new book, "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger," Yglesias argues that if America's going to remain top dog on the geopolitical block and stay a step ahead of rising giants with 10-figure populations, like China and India, we need to double our numbers ... and then some. That means boosting birthrates and welcoming scads of new immigrants. The book is a detailed examination of the policies we'd need to make this happen. Matt and I explore the under-appreciated virtues of population density and specialized clusters, which turns into a sort of digressive case study of the beneficial long-term effects of our old early-oughts wonk-blogger DC poker game. We talk about whether we really ought to care if America remains king of the mountain, how to encourage larger families in a non-creepy way, and much more. We didn't get to a bunch of stuff I wanted to chat about, but we did cover a lot of ground. I always find talking to Matt fun, stimulating, and oddly relaxing. This conversation is no exception and I hope you enjoy it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

Here's a question we rarely explicitly ask: Who should we honor, celebrate, and remember ... and why? What's the point of it? Scores of statues to confederate soldiers, slaveowners, and other dubious but celebrated characters have been recently toppled from their pedestals. Was this a good idea? Should we worry that we'll forget our history? This week's guest, Jacob T. Levy, argues that the greater risk is that we won't go far enough. We might need to topple a few more statues. We discuss Levy's two-part essay "Honoring the Dishonorable," one on the living and one on the dead. Both turn on an intriguing idea from Adam Smith: that we humans are saddled with a deep-seated bias toward over-praise and over-honor and over-identify with the great, powerful, and famous, even if they're objectively vile. Levy ingeniously applies Smith's idea to question of statue toppling, but also to the question of what to do about notable and notorious Trump administration cronies and collaborators after they return to private life. In addition, we talk about why we both stopped worrying and started to love democracy. We also dig into the question of why we should believe that old dead guys like Adam Smith could be good guides to human nature and the nature of moral truth? Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University. He is the author of "The Multiculturalism of Fear" and "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom." He's a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Institute for Humane Studies.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com

A freestyle introduction to Model Citizen with host Will Wilkinson.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit modelcitizen.substack.com